Channel probe measurements for the American sector clutter experiment, January, 1994

Abstract

The ionospheric phenomenon called Equatorial Spread F encompasses a variety of effects associated with plasma irregularities occurring in the post-sunset and nighttime ionosphere near the magnetic equator. These irregularities can seriously degrade the performance of systems which involve either of necessity or inadvertently radio propagation through the equatorial ionosphere. One such system is Over-the-Horizon (OTH) radars which operate in the high-frequency (hf) band and use ionospheric reflection for forward and backscatter propagation to ranges of thousands of kilometers. When such radars are directed towards the equator, Spread F irregularities can cause scintillation effects which may be aliased into the ranges of interest and have the effect of causing, excess clutter in which targets may be hidden. In January, 1994 Los Alamos participated in a campaign to measure Spread F effects on OTH propagation from the United States looking towards South America in conjunction with local diagnostics in Peru. During the campaign Los Alamos fielded a 1600 km bistatic path between Piura, Peru, and Arequipa, Peru-, the one-hop reflection region for this path was near the magnetic equator, We obtained four types of measurements: an oblique ionogram between Piura and Arequipa every three minutes; Doppler spread and spatial correlation for amore » single frequency cw path between Piura and Arequipa; Doppler spread, time-delay spread, and spatial coherence for a 10 kHz bandwidth path between Piura and Arequipa-, and Doppler spread and time-delay spread for the one-way path between the AVA radar in New York and Arequipa, Peru. This report describes the diagnostic experiments that we carried out and gives a brief description of some of the data we obtained.« less